God’s grace never changes toward us. However, our feeling toward God’s grace changes with time. Actually, there is never a moment that God’s grace ceases. However, the experience of our enjoyment of God’s grace changes. The first condition for the enjoyment of grace is our need. The more need we sense, the more we treasure grace. Those who do not feel any need will not consider God’s supply as grace. One failure of the saints is to think that a man needs God’s grace only when he is a sinner. It is true that we are saved by God’s grace. But we need God’s grace all our lives, and there is not a moment when we do not need God’s grace. Those who begin with God’s grace have to be perfected through God’s grace. It is true that God has forgiven our sins and has caused the judgment of our sins to fall on the Lord Jesus. Everyone who believes in Him is saved. Such grace is indeed the greatest. But our heart is most wicked. When we become more advanced in our Christian journey, the Lord may grant us more grace to have more victories, and spontaneously we credit these glories of victories to ourselves and consider ourselves as rather good! Although the Lord remains the same toward us, we do not feel Him and do not sense as much need for Him as before! Because of the deceitfulness of our heart, many times God allows us to fall into temptations or even to be sifted by the devil. When we fail, we condemn and blame ourselves and hate our own sins, thinking that we are sin incarnate and that it would not be too much for the Lord even to condemn us to perdition again. At such times, God shows us His grace. Although we are deep in sins, His grace is sufficient for us, and He is willing to forgive our sins. Although we have failed, He will not forsake us.
How our hearts then swell in gratitude! How we marvel at the Lord’s amazing grace! Although we are hopeless sinners, He is still willing to bestow grace and mercy upon us, and He still cares for us. This makes us all the more thankful for God’s amazing grace, and it causes us to realize that we need His grace moment by moment. If God had not been bestowing grace on us continually, we would have perished long ago in the same way the worldly ones have. Those who know their own sins know the preciousness of God’s grace.
Grace always humbles a person. If a person is not a sinner, he does not need grace. To confess that one is a sinner is to be humble. When the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sins, it is easy at that moment for us to humble ourselves. But how difficult it is for us to judge ourselves day by day and to consider that no good thing is in our flesh! It is not an easy thing for a person to continuously consider himself incapable and unable to perform good. Our heart always wants to glorify itself, thinking that we can and will do good, forgetting God’s grace and reckoning that we have no need of it. Only when we have humbled ourselves will we confess that our life in Adam is just corrupt and defiled. Only then will we pursue God’s grace. We feel the sweetness of God’s grace during the times of our failures. But we should in the same way feel His sweetness all the time. We feel the need to have God’s grace when we sin. In the same way we should feel the need for such grace all the time. What a pity that we acknowledge the filth of the Adamic life only when this old Adamic life is activated, but we have a different evaluation of it and are not willing to humble ourselves at other times when the old Adamic life is hidden. May we learn to realize that within our nature and our life, nothing is free from the stain of sin. If we did not have God’s grace, we would have perished long ago. Hallelujah! With the Lord there is grace.
We are familiar with the hymn "Amazing Grace." Although this is a good hymn, it does not speak of the Triune God as our portion for our enjoyment. When this hymn was written, the experiential knowledge of God among the Lord's people had not come to this point. Even as recent as fifty years ago, Christians did not have the understanding of grace as the Triune God experienced and enjoyed by us. But standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, we have come to know that grace is far more than merely unmerited favor. Grace is the Triune God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—processed for our experience and enjoyment.